The Long and Winding Road (The Seafare Chronicles 4)

“When—after…. Damn, I don’t know why this is still so hard to talk about.”

He didn’t speak. Just waited for me to find my words. I adored everything about him.

I sighed. “Before I got my head out of my ass and did the right thing, we didn’t have much. We didn’t have anything. And your parents always offered, and Anna and Creed were there, but I didn’t always let myself have that, you know?” I shrugged awkwardly. “It was a… weird time. Noodles.”

“I’m—”

“Otter, I swear to god if you’re going to apologize, I’m dumping my plate in your lap.”

He scowled at me. “I wasn’t going to apolo—”

“You had that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“That one you get when you feel guilty about stuff that happened a long time ago that you had no control over. And now you’ve got the grumpy look on your face when you know I’m right but don’t want to admit it.”

He ignored that and instead said, “Wine?” as he uncorked the bottle.

“I’m onto you, Thompson. You’re up to something.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re projecting.”

“Yeah, because that’s something I do—wait. Okay, it is, but I’m not right now! You seem to have forgotten that I know you better than anyone. You’re being shifty.”

“You do know me better than anyone,” he agreed, pouring me a glass and setting it next to my plate. I wasn’t going to fall for it. He was trying to get me drunk to ask me for some kinky sex thing involving a traffic cone or to tell me he’d actually been working with the mob all these years and that we had to go into witness protection. It would actually explain quite a lot, and now he was giving me that look, that soft look he got sometimes with me, like he knew I was being ridiculous. I never thought I’d ever have anyone look at me that way, and even now, even after all this time, it still knocked me for a loop whenever it happened.

“Sappy,” I muttered before I picked up the full wineglass and drank half of it in one go. I felt better after that.

“Can’t I just do something nice for my husband?”

“Keep talking. When it finally comes out and I tell you that I told you so, I am going to give you so much shit. But we can’t go into witness protection until the Kid graduates. I won’t uproot his life like that.”

“Bear, I’m not in the mafia.”

“I wasn’t thinking that!”

He waited.

“Okay, I was thinking that a little, but you’re acting strange, and now I’m getting nervous.” I took another drink of wine through a mouthful of chicken Alfredo.

“You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.”

“Is it a kinky sex thing?” I blurted out. “If it’s a kinky sex thing involving a traffic cone, I don’t know if I can do that. I mean, do you know how much lube you’d have to use for that? And where the hell would we even get a traffic cone? It’s not like we can steal one from a construction site, because they’d all be dirty, and I won’t put dirty traffic cones up my ass, Otter, I really won’t. I don’t want to have to go to the emergency room to have to explain to a doctor why I need to have gravel extracted from my asshole. And if that happens, I am going to blame it all on you, because I won’t be taking the blame for it. I won’t. You will be there holding my hand while they take dirty asshole rocks out of me because you couldn’t take the time to order a goddamn traffic cone online, if that’s even possible. And you know I’m okay with trying new things, but I still get freaked out over that video we saw with the two guys on the seesaw that had those obscene dildos on either end and they kept seesawing them into each other’s asses, and why would anyone even think about doing that? Why would you take a piece of child’s playground equipment and make it sexual? I mean, yeah, there’s sex swings, and that’s fine, but a seesaw? A seesaw, Otter. With dildos on it. Who does that? What’s next? A slide made of anal beads? Hanging from the monkey bars by nipple clamps? And that’s another thing! How do I know what nipple clamps are? We’ve never used them. We’re so normal, we’re not even vanilla. We’re vanilla bean. That’s what this is, isn’t it? You’re getting me drunk so you can tell me we need to have a kinkier sex life. Oh my god. I knew you were up to something. All I wanted to do was come home after dealing with little shits all day who apparently can’t survive an hour without checking their Myspace or sending their twatterings about how everything is hard because they’re fourteen years old and no one will ever understand them. I wanted to come home and just forget about that, but now I have Alfredo sauce on my face while you are talking about sticking a sounding rod in my dick and—how the fuck do I know what a sounding rod is?”

I sucked in a deep breath.

Otter said, “Wow. That went places I didn’t expect.”

“You can’t stick anything in my dick! You look online for a traffic cone, but nothing goes in my dick, Otter.”

“Myspace. Twattering. Jesus Christ. It’s like you’re twenty-eight and eighty all at the same time.”

I glared at him over the top of the wineglass, which had gotten refilled at some point. He was so good to me. “I know things,” I said, licking my lips for any drops of wine that thought they could escape me.

“Bear, when you got a smartphone for the first time, you thought an app store was a physical place you had to go to in order to download apps.”

“The salesman didn’t have to be so rude about it. I mean, he acted like no one had ever thought the same thing before.”